Gartner Report - Colocation-Based Interconnection

Digital business is enabled and enhanced through high-speed, secure, low-latency communication among enterprise assets, cloud resources, and an ecosystem of service providers and peers. Architects and IT leaders must consider carrier-neutral data center interconnection as a digital business enabler.

Gartner highlights key topics:

Digital business will require the integration of a wide variety of applications and information sources. Some will be traditional customer-owned and on-premises, while others will involve new data types and sources, as well as third-party data feeds.

It is unlikely that enterprises will be able to build rich digital business applications based solely on a traditional on-premises data center, with a limited number of data sources and applications.

The ability to integrate multiple applications, data types and data sources in a secure, predictable, lower-latency fashion will spell the difference between digital business success and failure.

In the near term, simple topology and physical interconnection via fiber optics will provide compelling reasons to use data center interconnect as the integration point, or glue, for digital business. As data center interconnect fabrics become more prevalent, and their APIs standardized and written to, the dynamism and speed of these connections will foster the development of even more useful applications. Finally, as container orchestration systems develop affinity and capabilities in conjunction with data center interconnect fabrics over the next three to five years, the advantages of a data-center-centric model become overwhelming.

Source: Gartner Colocation-based Interconnection Will Serve as the ‘Glue’ for Advanced Digital Business Applications, Bob Gill, 10 August 2017.